War Rages On
by TallysGreatestFan
Summary: After the war against the Centauri starts to get worse for the Narn, Na'Toth joins G'Kar for an evening of drinking. It doesen't proceed as any of them had expected, and they will show each other deeper insights than its comfortable for them - emotionally and physically. - Second Part is ,,You'll Be At My Side Through It All"


_Music: ,,Elastic Heart" – Sia  
,,War Rages On" – Alex Clare_

In hindsight, Na'Toth thought, the alcohol was obviously to blame.

It had all started out so ordinary.  
She sat in her quarters, listened to a rock singer screaming his lungs out on her music player and carved a piece of soapstone. With every smooth movement of the stone plane her tension left a bit more. Her fingers moved over the half-finished sculpture almost without thinking and her thoughts wandered too, but she still had to concentrate enough to prevent them from running off-track. For once at this day, she didn't have to think hard, estimate what actions would be the best to take and which words would convince her opponent. She could simply let her thoughts wander as they occurred her.

Despite having earphones on, she could hear G'Kar singing while preparing their dinner. The lonely fish song. Again.  
But it was oddly idyllic, the smell of the dish and his calm voice, mixed with Ko'Jer's, which sounded as if he was trying to make a war cry while being strangled.

She glanced to G'Kar again. He was tending cheerfully to the stove. As she noticed that the desperate and strained expression that had marked his face the whole day was finally gone, she felt how a bit of tension left her, as well.  
For her, cooking was a waste of time, but it made her glad that he had found a way to unwind and it was definitely more practical than going to the Zocalo and wasting the embassy budget on buying some food there.

"Dinner is ready!", he hummed, and she walked over to the living room barefoot and with bare hands.

"It's a human dish called 'lasagna'", he explained.

"Tastes just like Jo'tach"

When they were almost finished eating, he put a bottle full of blue liquid on the table.  
"I do believe we have earned this!", he made a move to hand the bottle over to her.

"I don't drink alcohol.", she announced, "It makes my mind too slow and dull for my duties towards the Narn republic."

"I don't think you have any duties left this afternoon."

"Well…", she wished she had. Relaxing and doing nothing somehow felt like waiting, even if she had finished all she was meant to do after the defeat of the Narn fleet once more at Sovar Three yesterday. Maybe an evening of drinking with G'Kar would be a good idea, and a little bit of a distraction.

She grabbed the bottle and took a big gulp. The blue stuff tasted bitter and spicy and burned her mouth, but she didn't want to show weakness in front of G'Kar, and so she took another one.

"One usually drinks this mixed with juices.", he commented.

"Good.", she managed to say, "It tastes absolutely disgusting!"

He opened the kitchen cupboard, brought a bottle of juice and poured some of it in her goblet, and then in his own, mixing it with the blue stuff.

"Anything else about drinking this I should know about?"

He laughed. It was so good to finally see him laugh again.

"No.", he chuckled. She looked at him, wanting to hear the story he was thinking of.

"This situation reminds me at the first time I was drunk. I was fifteen and my resistance cell had managed to get hold of a big stock of Centauri supplies, including almost three hundred bottles of Brivari. It had to many other ingredients to use it for disinfection, and distilling the alcohol out of it would have wasted to much of our resources, so they gave it to the resistance fighters. There was this boy whose mother had been an servant for an Centauri noble who explained us that there was a traditional way to serve it and that one had to splay out ones fingers in a very unnatural way while holding the glass, and we all failed to do it properly, until one of my comrades just hissed that we would show no respect for this Centauri liquid just as they weren't paying any respect to us, and from then on everybody just drank as much as they were able to. Some when, said girl who had interrupted him managed to conclude a bet with that boy that she would be able to 'destroy' the most Brivari of all of us. And so she did. She drank so much that one of us called some of our commanders to witness this. She was very proud when they arrived. She was so drunk that she swayed uncontrollably and wasn't even able to stand unmoving anymore, she shook like reed in the wind. But there she stood, tall and proud, looking the commander right in the eye, for maybe twenty seconds. And then she vomited right onto his armor."

Na'Toth burst into laughter.

They told more hilarious stories from their lives, and that they drunk more and more of the strange blue liquor made – as Na'Toth secretly suspected – the stories even funnier. Despite her attempts to drink as little as possible without G'Kar noticing her doing that, Na'Toth felt how her head felt lighter and lighter, as if gravity would partially loose its effect. But then the event with her mother and her sister and the statue came to her mind:  
"For the most part, my mother has a fascinating taste in art but she is getting older and older and sometimes she just becomes… cranky. One day, we meet after my service at the Kha'Ri, and suddenly, she carries a box out of her shuttle and hands me a statue of a gigantic pink sheep."

"A pink sheep? Was that a symbol of the disassociation of a foreign culture when it is seen with the eyes of another culture?"

"At first, I expected something like this, too. But it was no symbol. No hidden meaning. It was just a gigantic pink sheep. 'I knew you would like it, Na'Toth!', she said, 'You were always interested in sculptures!' You know me, usually I rather say if I dislike something. Yet she was so happy about finally having found a gift I liked. And so I took the sheep."  
She wanted to impress him with her skill in formulating, but she didn't manage to remember the word she wanted to use anymore, and so she simply said: "Wait, the story continues. One day, my sister, my mother and I went to holiday on Gostak and hiked trough the dunes. Suddenly, my sister said: 'Na'Toth, do you still have this pink sheep?'  
"Yes!', I said.  
And my mother replied: 'Oh, it is so cute! Na'Toth loves it, right?'  
Somehow, I managed to look delighted.  
'That is too bad', my sister said, 'I find it to be a very nice and cute statue, and I think it would look good in my garden'  
Selflessly, I responded: 'I love the sheep, but you are my sister, you can have it.'  
Down to the present day I don't know if my sister really likes it, or if she simply sacrificed herself to prevent the pink sheep from undermining my authority at the Kha'Ri, or if she maybe thought her kindergarten group would enjoy it or something. But I am too good of a diplomat to ever ask."

G'Kar laughed, but somehow, for the first time today, it didn't reach her. A feeling of absence rose inside her and as much as she tried to fight it down, she didn't manage it. His laughter broke off.

"Na'Toth, everything alright?"

"Yes.", she said.  
But they didn't find another topic after that, and so he simply looked at her with concern, and after some time, she simply said: "I… I regret that I didn't visit them more often. All those years, I told myself that the Narn republic would need my services and that my family could wait. And now I discover that I can't do anything for anybody and… I miss them, G'Kar. All of them. My parents, my sister, my uncle and his husband, even my sister's loud and bratty children. Why is it that in one moment, everything is normal, and in the next… you realize that there is war and that the last time you saw somebody was… was maybe the last time you ever saw them and if you just would have realized that this moment was the last with them… you wished you could have cherished it more."

He put his hand on her shoulder. Somehow, feeling that he was truly here with her made the feeling a bit easier to bear.  
"I know. I have a lot of such last moments from which I did not realize back then that they were last moments."

"In the resistance?"

"Yes. And later in my political career. Striving for power is not exactly a safe business, as you know."

"Me too. Not to mention all those colleges with uneasy political opinions who where probably assassinated by Centauri or some extremists, but where one could never verify anything because whoever murdered them did it to skillfully."

She breathed in deeply and saw all their war cruisers and star fighters and jump points in front of her mind's eye, and how even in this moment, Narn died, and the Centauri came closer and closer to their home world. She suddenly realized that she had never been afraid for their home planet itself. For herself, her friends, her political goals, the republic's power, but never for their homeworld.

"I've never been in a war myself. My grandfather and my great aunt fought in the Dilgar War, but as barbaric as it was it was never close to homeworld, and I am too young to have witnessed the occupation. My memories start just after it as we were slowly re-building everything the Centauri had destroyed. I know that I am tough and strong and smart, that I know how to survive.", she tried to keep her voice from wavering, and failed, "Yet if they really manage to break through to homeworld – and they seem to have a power on their side that is too strong for us – you will know how it was back then, and what you can do. But I will be completely lost."

He stared right through her: "It is nothing one can be prepared for. One simply reacts how one is able to react in this situation. We can only pray that G'Quan gives us the strength to survive this."

"Forgive me if I sound rude, but – how can you still believe after all that has happened?"

He smiled sadly, and stared at the table, deep in thought. Then he began to quote some sort of a poem. It began with the Phrase ,,The war rages on" and the singer called his god during the song, telling how they gave him strengh and acompanied them through all, begging them to forgive their sins and finally hear their call. But the war just raged on.  
"It was on Nostalgia Radio as Apor'Kor broke down a few days ago, but I cannot stop thinking about it.

"I envy the strength of your belief.", she turned and tilted her goblet in her hands, "As I was young, I was one of these arrogant atheists who believed that everyone religious is a fool relying on imaginary forces and idiotic tries to explain things they don't understand. And then my grandfather came back from Deathwalker's experiments. He was the bravest and strongest man I knew, and he had a sense of humor so dark that my own is nothing compared to it. He used to teach me and my sister fighting tricks or worked in the garden with us. But then, more and more of his brain stopped working. He hallucinated, he got several injuries because he wasn't able to do this or that movement anymore, until finally he lay in bed all day or watched TV or stared into the air and wasn't even able to talk anymore. Wasn't able to eat, or to go to the toilet alone. Three times a day, home care came. My grandmother had to use all of her money simply to not let him die miserably in his own shit and starving at the same time. My sister sat with him and fed him patiently or played card games with him that were actually made for pouchlings, and I… I worked in the garden all day, or sat in a corner and learned for my final exams, because I couldn't deal with seeing him like this. My sister, you, you are all such caring people, full of compassion and empathy, but I… I am just pragmatic and rational and cold.  
My grandparents were highly religious followers of G'Lan. Once, they gifted me the book of G'Lan for F'Haq's Day, a special edition ornated with glass and copper, and I was furious that they didn't give me a useful gift, and my mother just shook her head about how fanatic they were. But now, their belief helped them. My grandmother watched the morning prayers on TV every day with my grandfather, and this was the only time a day when he seemed as if he would actually realize what was going on around him. And as he finally died, my grandmother was happy that he went to the afterlife. That was when I realized how much strength belief gives and how important it is for a society.  
It gives you strength, too. After everything that has happened, you still believe that the universe can change, that all people are able to overcome their prejudices, that things could become good for us again. You still continue fighting. I…", her eyes burned, "…I envy this hope you have. I wish I could believe, too… I wish I could believe that there is a higher sense to all this suffering, that people are good, that hope is a thing that exists. But I… I simply can't."

Her eyes burned, she could hardly breathe and her body suddenly felt shaky and frail.  
He hugged her then. He closed his arms tightly around her, and he was warm and firm and alive, and she buried her face in his neck. The feeling of the leather of his armor and his soft, warm skin was soothing, and she breathed in the scent of him, so ever-present that she had never before spared a thought at what he smelled like.  
She let go and cried until his robe was soaked with her tears, and was dimly aware that only the alcohol made her frail like this. She didn't cry easily normally. But the knowledge didn't help at all.

After a while, she didn't know anymore if he was comforting her or she was comforting him. They simply laid in each other's arms and sobbed like two complete idiots.

"At least we have each other.", he managed to say and caressed her back, "It is fortunate to have an attaché like you, who I trust and who is also my dearest friend."

A sprinkle of warmth went through her chest. She felt as if she must say something profound, too, but nothing occurred her, and so she simply said: "Yes."

Authors note:

Finally, finally I have finished this! I had the idea in my head since na'toth-attache wrote with me how much it sucks that there is hardly any fanfiction for her OTP, but I didn't remembered the whole Narn arc well enough to write about G'Kar or Na'Toth, only after I rewachted Babylon 5 I knew the circumstances good enough to acutally write this. I was quite insecure about it because both G'Kar and Na'Toth even more, as much as I love her, are very unlike me and I also only wrote about them once before. I feared that I would not manage to get their voices right, or to find the POV of an opressed people like the Narn as an white European. But now, I really love the way it turned out, and the first half is actually my only work that could be considered as ,,literary precious" The poem G'Kar quotes is the lyrics of Alex Clares ,,War Rages On", what I also choose as the title of this story 


End file.
